Monitorama, Berlin, EU - Day 2 and final considerations

Moving toward the end of IT conferences your expectations sometime gets lower cause the speakers are tired and so are the attendees. You kind of expect things to get quieter but this wasn’t the case with Monitorama EU 2013.

On this second day I found that all of the talks were as interesting, entertaining and inspiring as the ones on the first day.

I enjoyed all the talks proposed today but I got very inspired by the ones from Jeff Weinstein which talked about how you can use data collected for metrics and monitoring to improve the whole company. I also appreciated the speech from Gareth Rushgrove which highlighted how security is actually still underrated in IT companies and how/why you should try to integrate monitoring with security auditing tools.

I’ve been asked a few times, during the day and the evening, which was my opinion about the conference and the answer was always “absolutely positive!”. I always add that though I don’t expect to see any rocket science in these conferences I kind of suppose that I’ll get a lot of hints, ideas and tips which are a wonderful trampoline for new personal or work-related projects. That is exactly what I got.

The other aspect you unexpectedly get in this kind of technical conferences is an incredibly positive social experience with plenty of information exchanged both on a personal and technical perspective. I always over-stress this aspect because sometimes people go to conferences, listen to the talks, learn something and go home unsatisfied. That’s mostly because they missed the point.

If you want to learn new stuff you have a marvellous thing called Internet with GitHub, SlideShare and many useful books out there. What you’ll always miss from all this sources is the “human factor” which you only get when you hang out with other people that share interests with you. Who are willing to share their knowledge with you (hint: open source communities) and in general are there to enjoy staying together, just for a few days, with other weird humans which share their same passion: their IT work.

So in the end my impressions are very positive, and I’d like to thank all the guys behind the conference organization to have it run as good as it did. I’m sure I’ll join you again, hopefully soon.